Nationalism is a particularly slippery subject to define and understand, particularly when applied to early modern Europe. In this collection of essays, Brendan Bradshaw provides an insight into how c
Father Bradshaw examines the dissolution of the religious orders in Ireland as an episode of Irish ecclesiastical and political history, and of the English Reformation. He also analyses its relationship to Henry VIII's Irish policy as a whole and to the beginnings of English colonialism. He discusses in detail the state of the religious orders on the eve of suppression, the extent of opposition to the implementation of the suppression policy in all its stages, the secularisation of monastic lands and the results of dissolution for Irish society and for subsequent Irish history. Despite the sensitive issues involved, Catholic, Protestant and academic historians have shown remarkable unanimity in the interpretation of the episode of the dissolution in Ireland. A thorough knowledge of both primary and secondary sources enables Father Bradshaw to challenge many of the conventional assumptions.
This book assembles ten special studies, each devoted to an aspect of Fisher's multifaceted career or to exploring the intellectual and religious outlook of someone who was at the same time a moderniser, a reformer and an opponent of the Reformation. John Fisher's career provides an illuminating perspective on English religious and intellectual history in a crucial phase of development. As a churchman he became the foremost preacher in England, issuing a call to ecclesiastical reform and personal repentance that echoed the call of Savonarola at Florence. At the same time he provides an early example of the pastoral bishop that was to become the ideal of both the Reformation and the Counter Reformation. Finally in the crisis that paved the way for the English Reformation, he became the leading defender of Queen Catherine against the divorce suit of Henry VIII. He was among the small band who were executed in 1535 as conscientious objectors to the oaths of Succession and Royal Ecclesias
The historical resonances of the concept of 'Britain' for the communities of the Atlantic Archipelago in the early modern period are explored here in terms of the ideological demands made upon it. Various and competing concepts of Britishness are examined, from the Henrician legislation which united Wales with England and which created the kingdom of Ireland, to the Act of Union of the realms of England and Scotland. The chequered history of the consciousness of Britain as a polity which embraced the united kingdoms is discussed in relation to the distinctive national identities of the constituent countries, and the question of the impact of 'Britain' on English policy-making under the Tudor, Stuart and the first Hanoverian monarchs is addressed. The puzzling resistance of the Irish to assimilation in contrast to the docility of the Welsh and - eventually - of the Scots is also explored.
In this volume of essays a group of historians and literary critics debate the representation of early modern Ireland by English Renaissance authors. The contributions deal both with modes of representation – aesthetic, geographic, literary, political, visual – and with the biographies of representative individuals. Thus historical commentary and textual analysis go hand-in-hand with biography and chronology. The essays are interdisciplinary, combining traditional methods of literary and historical enquiry with a range of new theoretical approaches to texts and their authors. There are discussions of the work of major writers including John Bale, Gabriel Harvey, Barnaby Googe, Edmund Spenser, John Milton and Geoffrey Keating in the context of Irish politics from the Reformation to the Restoration.
The historical resonances of the concept of 'Britain' for the communities of the Atlantic Archipelago in the early modern period are explored here in terms of the ideological demands made upon it. Various and competing concepts of Britishness are examined, from the Henrician legislation which united Wales with England and which created the kingdom of Ireland, to the Act of Union of the realms of England and Scotland. The chequered history of the consciousness of Britain as a polity which embraced the united kingdoms is discussed in relation to the distinctive national identities of the constituent countries, and the question of the impact of 'Britain' on English policy-making under the Tudor, Stuart and the first Hanoverian monarchs is addressed. The puzzling resistance of the Irish to assimilation in contrast to the docility of the Welsh and - eventually - of the Scots is also explored.
Historiography has highlighted Ireland's sixteenth-century rebellions and ignored its revolution. The transformation of the island's political personality in the course of the middle Tudor period must be the last remarked-upon change in its whole history. Yet it might be claimed to be the most remarkable. It provided Ireland with its first sovereign constitution, gave it for the first time an ideology of nationalism, and proposed a practical political objective which has inspired and eluded a host of political movements ever since: the unification of the island's pluralistic community into a coherent political entity. The reason for the neglect lies partly in another remarkable feature of the revolution itself, the circumstances of its accomplishment. it was engineered by Anglo-Irish politicians, in collaboration with an English head of government in Ireland, and by constitutional means, in particular by parliamentary statute.
